John Ringling's House of John

The pink towers rising from Sarasota Bay belonged to John Ringling, and he built them to say something specific: that a boy from a small town in Iowa who ran away with the circus could end up living in a Venetian palace on a Florida bay. Ca d'Zan means House of John in the dialect of Venice, and from the moment Ringling and his wife Mable began planning it around nineteen twenty-three, the house was intended to be a statement of arrival that nobody could miss.

Owen Burns completed the construction in nineteen twenty-six, and the price came to one and a half million dollars, which in the nineteen twenties was a sum that made newspaper headlines. The house has thirty-six thousand square feet, fifty-six rooms, Gothic arched windows, terra cotta ornament copied from Venetian originals, a ballroom with a coffered ceiling, and a terrace that reaches directly to the bay where the Ringlings could step from their private dock into a gondola. The Ringlings had traveled extensively in Venice, and the architectural vocabulary of the place is genuinely Venetian, not a pastiche.

John also began building the art museum next door in nineteen twenty-five, a pink Renaissance palace to house the Old Master paintings he had been acquiring in Europe. The collection runs heavily to seventeenth century Baroque, including one of the largest collections of Rubens in the Western Hemisphere. When Ringling died in nineteen thirty-six, he had almost nothing left in his bank account. The Florida land boom had wiped out most of his fortune, and legal disputes had consumed the rest. But his will bequeathed Ca d'Zan, the art museum, the circus museum, and the grounds to the State of Florida.

The state did very little with them for decades. Florida State University took over management in two thousand, invested in restorations, and by the time the campus reopened the mansion had been returned to something close to what Mable and John had built together on this bay.